The capture and presentation of three-dimensional images to an audience is a natural progression of the art of filmmaking, as it makes use of one of the aspects of the stereoscopic human vision system that has been previously ignored: depth perception. 3D content presents the viewer with a more immersive view of movies, television, and other visual media.
For a viewer to perceive a scene as 3D, at least two unique perspectives of the scene must be presented, with each perspective related to the others in a specific way. The simplest 3D image, known as a stereoscopic 3D image, can be generated with just two perspectives. The two perspectives mimic the stereoscopic view of human eyes. They exist as 2D images on their own, but because of the parallax discrepancies between the two, when viewed together using special equipment, the perception of depth is possible.
While this is an improvement over flat 2D images, the limitation of only two perspectives means the depth of the scene is seen from a locked position. This is considered acceptable for certain viewing situations, such as sitting in a movie theater to watch a movie. Normally, however, humans overcome this limitation via their ability to move their heads and look around a scene. To accomplish this with recorded media, even more perspectives of the scene must be recorded and presented to the viewer, in a process known as autostereoscopic viewing. The number of perspectives can range from a few, as with lenticular technologies, to many, as with holographic technologies.
Although recording multiple perspectives is feasible during the initial capture or filming of the images, for images that have already been captured using just a single perspective, such as the vast majority of recorded films and television shows in existence today, it is difficult to extrapolate and create the additional perspective views required for a 3D experience.
Conversion techniques presently offered in the art have allowed computers to help with repetitious parts of the 2D to 3D conversion process. However, due to the variety of tasks and complexity inherent in even the simplest of scenes, a human user, who has the innate advantages of stereoscopic vision, object recognition, and edge detection, is required to accomplish accurate and high quality 2D to 3D image conversion. Furthermore, known tools within graphic software packages or software filter plug-ins are not specifically designed for 2D to 3D image conversion and consequently do not offer the fast or accurate user feedback necessary to facilitate a true-to-life and believable re-creation of a 3D image within a realistic timeframe. Accordingly, it is desirable to have systems and methods for conversion of 2D images to 3D images with which a human user or operator can easily interact and make the communication between the user's desires and the systems as seamless as possible.